Net gain of common courtesy

FROM a hopelessly outmanoeuvred position on his baseline, Andy Murray angled a brilliant backhand past Novak Djokovic on the other baseline. Djokovic watched it flash by, then - though their Australian Open final was at a tense pass - made a gesture of applause towards Murray. Momentarily, tennis was ennobled.

There were other moments. Roger Federer, after his five-setter with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, forestalled the on-court interview until Tsonga had left and been given his due by the crowd. Federer was not perfect. Occasionally the competitive beast escapes even him. In his semi-final, he passed a snarly remark over the net at Murray, who sneered back. But this was a rare exception to Federer's career-long rule, which is why it attracted startled comment.

Tennis used to be a sport of niceties. Once, long before Hawk-Eye and howling, if a player thought his opponent had been wronged by a line call, he would deliberately lose the next point. When I mentioned this to a couple of Gen Y-ers recently, they were astonished. Perhaps it began to change with John McEnroe, a sublime player but a cynic who calculatedly sharpened his own game by abrading it against others'.

Now much of that old grace has gone. There are formalities, yes, but fewer niceties. Because a tennis match is so personal, fans like to see at beginning and end mutual acknowledgement, signals at least of respect, if not affection. But most, particularly the women, are brusque and cool at the net, and ungenerous in the interview room, which is doubly surprising because in many other endeavours, women set the sisterly example.

It was an especially fractious week in sport. At the tennis, there were other snippy disputes, concerning medical time-outs and shrieking (personally, I'm not that bothered by it. Fans want women to hit harder, some grow loud in the effort and, yes, Victoria Azarenka does audibly strain in practice).

In cricket, a Twenty20 international finished with an unseemly exchange of harsh words and pointed fingers between Glenn Maxwell, Mahela Jayawardene and others. Publicly, this was shrugged off with that most pathetic of modern excuses for sporting misbehaviour, an overflow of passion. In civilian life, a crime of passion is still a crime. In sport, it is something that asks to be admired. Meantime, Shane Warne branded Pat Howard a ''muppet''. Warne, of course, was driven to say this by passion.

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Then there was boxing. It was not that Anthony Mundine, outfought by Danny Geale, declared himself robbed, nor that he had repeatedly played the race card against Geale before the fight. Trash-talking and sore losing are compulsory elements of this half-sport, half-circus. Besides, Mundine, like McEnroe, sets out to give offence. Mundine does it in the spurious belief that it advances greater causes, especially indigenous. It diminishes them.

But there are protocols in boxing, as in tennis, that are supposed to affirm a common humanity beyond the confected enmity. One is for boxers to touch gloves at the start of the last round, a kind of ''may the best man win''. Geale offered his, Mundine refused to reciprocate. If I was a judge, I would have deducted two points right then.

In common in all this intemperance was a sense of blindness concerning the boundaries of civility. Call it mass blurting. In this, sport resembles the political sphere, now infamous for its culture of instant and tradeable offences and provocations.

As in politics, this disposition extends to followers, fans if you like. Social media has given them a voice, a loud one, but without a pause button. Correspondents to this column and others will infuse their missive with the first epithets that come to enraged minds: ''moron'' is the most common, also ''f---wit''.

Social media facilitates a much freer flow of ideas than previously, which is wonderful. Fans often have valid points to make, and a means of making them. The trouble with all the coarse language is that it obscures those points, rather than reinforcing them. Whether at a ground, in a pub or on email, no one, famous or otherwise, reacts kindly to abuse.

The medium is the message. It is not hard to imagine some of these fans alone in their blackened boltholes, not ever having to hold or avert the eyes of their targets, not seeing day, not perceiving limits.

There was another way, once. Before even my distant time, fans wrote letters, and got replies. Letter-writing was just slow enough for a writer to think about what she was writing, and sometimes of whom. While watching Djokovic this week, Ed Smith, author, Times correspondent and briefly an England cricketer, remembered four letters he received from The Guardian's inimitable Frank Keating, who died last week. He keeps and cherishes them still, in a way no email or tweet ever will be honoured.

It also made for a delicious humour. Geoff Lawson, when captain of NSW, once was so infuriated by another trenchant Bill O'Reilly newspaper critique of his work that he wrote him an impassioned letter. O'Reilly, schoolmaster as well as master spinner, returned it corrected in red pen, and marked C+.